A consortium led by Dr. Giovanni Pizzi, Group leader of the “Materials Software and Data” group in the Laboratory for Materials Simulations, has won funding of almost CHF1.3 million for a three-year project dubbed PREMISE: “Open and reproducible materials science research.”
The group’s three-year project PREMISE aims to establish, promote and facilitate the adoption of ORD practices that adhere to FAIR data principles in the field of materials science. During the course of the project, they will provide the missing critical components to enable open and reproducible research in an accessible format that is shareable with the broad scientific community. They will place a particular focus on addressing interoperability between data from simulations and experiments, because there are currently no established research data management practices for their combination.
During their project, they’ll draw on the existing platforms openBIS, an open-source data management platform developed at ETH Zurich, and AiiDA, an open-source workflow management system mainly developed at PSI and EPFL. The two platforms focus on different parts of the data life cycle—experiments and simulations, respectively.
“We believe that the synergy and connection between the two will also provide the missing link to enable the automation of complete experimental and analysis processes towards the establishment of FAIR-by-design autonomous laboratories; such a link is a crucial step for which ORD practices are missing,” the researchers said.
The funding for the project is linked to the ETH Board’s ORD Measure 1: Calls for Field-Specific Actions. PREMISE is an “Establish” project, meant to allow the establishment of ORD practices that already exist, bringing them to the next level, improving their scope, raising their level of quality and anchoring them as community standards.
In addition to Dr. Pizzi, the consortium consists of Dr. Carlo Pignedoli, deputy group leader of the “Atomistic simulations group” at Empa; Dr. Corsin Battaglia, laboratory head of the “Materials for Energy Conversion lab” at Empa; Dr. Bernd Rinn, section head at the ID Scientific IT Services group at ETH Zurich; Dr. Caterina Barillari, RDM service manager in the ID Scientific IT Services group at ETH Zurich; Dr. Henry Lütcke, scientific computing lead in the ID Scientific IT Services group and ETH Zurich; and Dr. Peter Kraus, scientist in the “Materials for Energy Conversion lab” at Empa (now at Technische Universität Berlin).
